Freezing up at Black Health Screen

When I boot on my Wii, it loads as far as the black "Press A to continue" screen warning about seizures and epilepsy or what have you, then... stops. In fact, the option to press A never shows up and I am unable to connect the Wiimotes.

This particular Wii is not modded though I have soft modded two previous Wiis with no problem.

The only suggestion I seem to have found is to boot up a disc of New Super Mario Bros Wii, as that contains the 4.2 update and this error sometimes occurs if an update is corrupted. However, I don't have a hard copy of the game handy.

Any ideas?

EDIT: Tried booting into NSMB after leaving it unplugged for an hour but no dice. Also, the Wiimotes now connect for some reason, but it seems to be unrelated to the game.

4 Answers

The resource files of the system menu (stored in NAND flash) are corrupted; there is no way for you to repair it yourself. If the system is still under warranty, you are best off sending it back to Nintendo. Otherwise, you can replace the main board.

Thanks for the info bushing -I did a little more research based on your reply.

First off, I did not bother opening up the Wii to test the Bluetooth board because I realized I can turn on the console with the remote even when it doesn't connect, which crossed out that possibility, unfortunately.

After looking around some people suggested the SaveMii chip to recover the system menu... but according to (your?) blog HackMii.com, they're ineffective.

I was hoping that because that post was written a couple years ago things have changed, but do you have any advice other than a complete mobo swap that will cost me almost the price of a new Wii?

Yup, that's me. :) Unfortunately, what I wrote still stands -- if anything, Wiis are getting harder to fix. Assuming you have some fairly new firmware on your system (>3.3), then your cheapest option would probably be to send it to Nintendo and see what they would charge you to fix it -- there's a decent chance they can fix it without opening the system (therefore, cheaply!), using a (hypothetical) repair disc. Otherwise, if you like tinkering with these things, you could try making a copy of NSMB (or any other game with a firmware update newer than what was installed), with the first byte of the disc patched to '0' (0x40); if you boot that with a SaveMii (or modified GC pad), it *should* install the update off the disc, which *might* overwrite whatever is corrupt in NAND. That's all very uncertain, so if that doesn't sound like fun, you should probably try to sell the Wii as broken on eBay and buy a used (but working) one. Good luck!

I had the exact same problem where the initial health warning screen loaded with the flashing click A button to continue type message. After pressing the A button a black screen would just hang and the system menu would not load.